“It actually reduces our cost of goods if we bring the manufacturing in house rather than buying some of our components already completed,” Dr Giles said.
OncoRes’ team of 40 have been recruited from across WA’s mining, medical, rail and defence industries, and is preparing for another capital raise as it eyes entry into the US market after being granted breakthrough device designation by the Food and Drug Administration.
OncoRes is not the only medical technology company emerging from WA, with the state now home to a burgeoning medical research sector that Premier Roger Cook says is integral to the long-term diversification away from mining.
“WA is already a world leader in autonomous and robotic technology used by our mining sector, we want to transfer those advantages into health and medical research,” Mr Cook told The Australian Financial Review.
Mining royalties
“There is some fantastic work being done in this field, and I’m proud that local companies like OncoRes Medical are beginning to get the recognition they deserve.”
The WA government is using about $250 million sourced from mining royalties to fund local medical research. The premier is banking on the sector “paying dividends” for the state long term.
The company is manufacturing a machine that uses quantitative microelastography, a new imaging technology that maps tissue stiffness at a microscale to detect breast cancer.
Dr Giles said most surgeons were currently forced to rely on their touch to differentiate healthy breast tissue from the cancer, resulting in 20 per cent of women, on average, having cancer left in their body and required to return for more surgery.
In the US, $US20 billion ($30.7 billion) is spent on breast cancer treatment each year, with instances of overlooked cancer and subsequent return surgeries costing roughly $US700 million.
Dr Giles says the probe gives surgeons a “digital superpower or touch” to detect cancer that would otherwise be missed.
More than $16 million OncoRes has raised has come from the Commonwealth and WA governments, which Dr Giles said had allowed the company to stay WA-based in its formative years, working to convince local family offices and investors to look beyond the state’s resources sector.
“Investors in WA are certainly far more comfortable with being able to make quite risky investments on mining,” she said.
“What we need to be able to do is educate. I would love to see a future where the investors had as much comfort investing in healthcare innovation as they currently do in mining and taking the risks because there are similar risks.”
